Your friendly neighbourhood geek

Why is my cursor jumping from one place to another?

My wife’s laptop has a strange problem. While typing in a Word document or an email the cursor seems to jump from away from where it’s suppose to be, which makes a major mess of the document. What can I do to avoid this?

Not an uncommon problem, almost all sufferers are laptop users and the reason it happens is related to the fact that most laptops have touchpad control panels slap-bang in the middle of their wrist-rests, right below the keyboard.

A mere brush from a palm heel or wayward thumb can be enough to command the text-entry cursor to leap to a different part of the document. That the problem seems to coincide with times when you have paused typing supports this hypothesis: taking a moment to think is precisely when your hands and fingers are likely to move from their typing positions.

In most cases, the problem can be alleviated or eliminated by altering the touchpad’s settings in Control Panel, or just disabling it entirely.

To do this in Windows 7, click Start followed by Control Panel, then click Hardware and Sound followed by Mouse. This displays the Mouse Properties dialogue box and what to do next depends on the specific type of touchpad.

The main thing to look for is something called Tapping. The last time I had this problem, I solved it by turning Tapping off. You may also want to play with sensitivity and in the worst case switch off the touchpad. Once you’ve solved it you can continue working on your business cash advances without your cursor jumping from one place to another.